“The Thesis That Everyone In My Family Is Talking About, When I Bring It Up”
“Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success. As any good grad student would do, I tried to fit in, mathematically. I absorbed the atmosphere and took attitudes to heart. I was miserable, and on the verge of failure. The problem was not individuals, but a system of self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support system. When I physically removed myself from the situation, I did not know where I was or what to do. First thought: FREEDOM!!!! Second thought: but what about the others like me, who don’t do math the “right way” but could still greatly contribute to the community? I combined those two thoughts and started from zero on my thesis. What resulted was a thesis written for those who do not feel that they are encouraged to be themselves. People who, for instance, try to read a math paper and think, “Oh my goodness what on earth does any of this mean why can’t they just say what they mean????” rather than, “Ah, what lovely results!” (I can’t even pretend to know how “normal” mathematicians feel when they read math, but I know it’s not how I feel.) My thesis is, in many ways, not very serious, sometimes sarcastic, brutally honest, and very me. It is my art. It is myself. It is also as mathematically complete as I could honestly make it.
I’m unwilling to pretend that all manner of ways of thinking are equally encouraged, or that there aren’t very real issues of lack of diversity. It is not my place to make the system comfortable with itself. This may be challenging for happy mathematicians to read through; my only hope is that the challenge is accepted.”
Example quote from this thesis: “We don’t use any aspect of Sn-ness here, so it’s okay if you don’t understand its precise definition, which is as follows: a number field is called an Sn-number field if its Galois closure has Galois group Sn (as opposed to it being a subgroup of Sn which would imply potential “extra symmetry.”) In the case of n = 4 it is actually important that we restrict ourselves to “S4-quartic rings”. For n = 3, 5 it doesn’t matter either way, so altogether we’ll say we’re looking at “Sn” number fields. For what it’s worth, I know I’m not being informative right now.”
^ so excellent. I’m feeling kind of inspired, as a scientist who thinks about lay-accessibility. Like, what would it mean if we wrote our papers like this sometimes?
quote from a blog post she wrote: “In my second year, my body temporarily lost the ability to properly deal with sugar. I don’t know if this is a thing. My doctor never really figured it out even after she got “really scientific about it.” Whatever it was, I realized stress had sent me to the hospital and I was thoroughly against that on principle, so I gave up stress. This decision seemingly cost me everything. I escaped without graduating in 2009. I had my first child in 2011. I became a conscious feminist. After decades and years of absorbing all the rules, a black teenaged boy was shot dead for no reason and his assailant was found not guilty because black boys are scary. I became consciously anti-racism. Two months later I threw out my previous draft and started on my thesis grenade.”
Related: “Let Physics Be the Dream It Used To Be: Or, how to make physics fun”
